I got an education (got schooled ) here a while back Arny and FMW can tell you about that Epic thread !
Actually they were very helpful .The more the thread progressed (with links to empirical verifiable proof ) the more I found out I did not know ! although I did not want to admit it!
It's safe to say I was firmly in the loosless camp and thought I knew a lot more than I did, I dug myself quite a hole .

I'm just as likely to listen to high bitrate mp3 or AAC now as anything. I've since done some of the comparisons mentioned above and some reading (lots ) at the urging of these two guys tons of info and links here more than you will ever need or that most could understand including me .

Lossy codecs can sound really good. That said, be careful of three things:

1. The fidelity is content dependent. So you have to know what content is more critical to test with than others. Take a live concert and listen to the audience clapping. Or pure vocals with no instruments. Or high frequency transients.

2. It is possible to "learn" to hear compression artifacts. This can happen naturally or over time by itself.

3. Of course some people will never hear them.

My recommendation is to use AAC if you want to go compressed route. It is far superior to MP3.

And do some testing with more critical content before you commit your entire library to lossy formats. Arny recently post a clip of keys jingling for a different set of tests: Debate Thread: Scott's Hi-res Audio Test. I just downsampled the 24/96 file he had post to 44.1 Khz/16 (i.e. CD format) saved it in a file. Then converted the same to 320 kbps MP3 (i.e. highest bit rate).

As you can see, I could easily tell the differences apart and this is at highest bit rate of 320 kbps. The final tally is 15 correct responses out of 16 with probability of guessing of 0%. I could do 16 out of 16 easily but think the message is communicated .

The segment I picked was just the first second or two of the files. Set those as start/stop times and run the test. If you can't hear the difference then lossy is fine for you. If you can, then my strong suggestion is to use lossless compression like FLAC.

BTW, the argument in the video posted by the OP is wrong. Yes, if you perform a difference between original and lossy file you will hear what has been discarded. The job of the codec is to do so in a way that is least audible. In the difference file you have taken away the original file so that audibility logic does not work. Since you don't listen to music that way, then it is not a proper way to analyze the situation.

What the comparison is good for is hearing where the most content has been taken out. If you listen, you will hear that it is in transients as I explained and low level detail

Lossy codecs can sound really good. That said, be careful of three things:

1. The fidelity is content dependent. So you have to know what content is more critical to test with than others. Take a live concert and listen to the audience clapping. Or pure vocals with no instruments. Or high frequency transients.

2. It is possible to "learn" to hear compression artifacts. This can happen naturally or over time by itself.

3. Of course some people will never hear them.

I can testify to this. I was listening to some old MP3s the other night, and two of them really caught my ey.. ear, especially in regards to the first two points. One was 128kbps, but was overall a very simple composition, and it sounded great, there was nothing "off" about it to my ears. The other was 320kbps, but, based on the sound, I believe it came from something much lower. It was a more complicated piece with more instruments and many different sounds going at the same time, and it sounded... "muffled", is the best word I can use to describe it. When the bass hit, you could hear the treble get "squashed" down by it, like the file just can't contain all the sound that the song contained. It wasn't clipping, there was no distortion, just.. a muffling, like part of the song was suddenly being played through a sock wrapped around the microphones. And this is stuff I can hear on my speakers, much less my headphones (which are significantly higher quality).

And, on the third point, I have friends that don't seem to really care that much. If I were to complain about those issues to them, they'd just say "meh, sounds fine to me". They're okay with DVD, too, I try not to get into arguments about A/V quality.. hehe.

In regards to the OP method that you mentioned, I would argue that the method shouldn't be used to determine what was lost, but more to simply determine if something was lost. IMO, simply seeing the "physical" evidence, proof of loss, is enough to convince me to go FLAC, regardless of whether I can actually hear the difference. In my mind, I know I'm not losing anything. If I listen to a MP3, I'll always be thinking to myself that I might be losing something, and it'll bug me. I'm actually in the process of re-ripping a lot of my favorite CDs (and even buying some new ones) since I got those new headphones a couple weeks ago.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by 89grand

frankxbe, yeah that's the name I remember, but I recognized the avatar. Big Al, or whatever he went by, and Urizen both rubbed me the wrong way, but I don't want to derail this thread, so feel free to PM me if you ever want to talk deeper on this subject.

Urizen..... that's understandable
I put a hilarious thread in wheels wings and water up today funny as S**T it's called GM firsts
it'a a list of most of the colossal turd bad cars and motors with my remarks they made over over a few decades it's intent is mostly humor .

One guy who's car was on the GM no fly list I made took it all wrong so I posted pithy reply .
I'm waiting for Bigjerk to defend one of the turds on the list it could be funny ha ha he's a fanboy .
Some won't see the humor I can PM the list if you want, some of it and the included remarks are funny
after over 40 yrs in that business I think I'm qualified to call out the known notorious automotive turds , Fords next

I might change my Avatar I'm getting bored with it and I've seen it around also .

Hires Music formats ..............."Why does it sound like a CD ?" ............. can we make it louder "?
"The wireless music box has no commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
- David Sarnoff's associates at RCA the 1920's -

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Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

Lossy codecs can sound really good. That said, be careful of three things:

What the comparison is good for is hearing where the most content has been taken out. If you listen, you will hear that it is in transients as I explained and low level detail

tubetwister

Thanks for posting I'm keeping everything in loss less like always and mostly AAC for casual listening I should have made note of that I like AAC better than mp*** whether I can hear the difference or not often I believe I can sometimes .

I'm only making a loosey in addition to a loss less track hdd are cheap plus I have a few GB of cloud storage if I need it there are some tracks I belive I hear the differences on
for whatever reasons but they are sometimes especially complex passages ,vocals and things like mid bass punch and definition ,transients and hi hat symbols to name a few but for a lot of things AAC works here for casual listening.
and ofc one needs to start with a good recording a bad one just goes from bad to worse .

I believe I can hear compression artifacts sometimes depending on the track but maybe its something else maybe bias expectation for all I know I'm not an expert. .Actually being biological and all something may sound good to me one day and maybe not as good the next even at the same levels speaker placement and seating or with phones been happening for years to me so that could account to some of what I may or may not hear also. Whats important to me sometimes is perception. I'm not trying to prove any science here or make a point ...... I'll leave that to the experts here .

EDIT : S**t at my age I'm not trying to prove anything any more spent a lifetime doing that for a living
it seemed like it anyway because in management especially at the corporate level you better be able to bolster your arguments, choose your battles wisely, gain support and validate your positions if want to be effective or in a lot of cases remain employed! It ain't government work let me tell ta !
Now I'm happy to just keep regular ☺☺☺

Since I have loss less and lossey I can always chose one or the other so it really isn't a pressing issue at all for me
If I think something would sound better listening to loss less even if in that case it doesn't I have a choice that's the cool. Good thing about favorable hdd pricing . I'm not giving up my lossless but .AAC is useful also .
In any event I'm appreciative of what I've learned here so far lots of stuff I would otherwise would have
never learned so it's all good .

EDIT " I never watched the video, listening to discarded scraps of music I Imagine would sound akin to listening to a sub woofer playing music by itself albeit at different frequencies if it would prove anything it would have already be done .IMO the theory in it self has some merit but the methodology as to proof of concept may be lacking .

With all respect to the OP (or the author of the video ) I think someone is barking up the wrong tree not necessarily in theory but the methodology to result in proof of concept if you will, because I believe whatever is in that video will be out of it's original context on it's own and impossible to evaluate audibly on its own as to how it may or may not affect the original tracks at least with human ears and audio memory anyway .
regards

Hires Music formats ..............."Why does it sound like a CD ?" ............. can we make it louder "?
"The wireless music box has no commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
- David Sarnoff's associates at RCA the 1920's -

Just because they support it doesn't mean that it doesn't involve sound quality losses.

Note that transcoding from a lossless format to a lossy format is going to sound as good as anything in that format will sound. My cautions only relate to transcoding from a lossy format to a different lossy format.

Of course.

Hence I advocate to have the audio in a lossless format to avoid generation loss in the future.

Hence I advocate to have the audio in a lossless format to avoid generation loss in the future.

Exactly. I keep all of my music in FLAC format on an external USB 3.0 drive. Actually, I have 3 of them -- one live, one backup (only switched on to copy new/updated music from the live drive), and one in my safe deposit box (swapped with the backup drive every couple of months to ensure I don't loose it all). Then I have an older USB 2.0 drive that I transcode everything to in WMA format to play on my phone. If a new lossy format comes along, I can still transcode from the lossless files with no compromises.

Some people may suggest that I have spent a lot of money on hardware that I could have saved by using a lossy format. But 2/3 of the cost is ensuring I am properly backed up. Considering the number of hours I have spent ripping, tagging, and organizing, it seems like a small price to pay.

Re Tubetwister
No losseless music on an SSD I can see that too expensive great for the OS and frequently used programs and mp3 though ! all the loosless is in the studio on those drives mostly for archiving sometimes projects .

I've got about 225GB of movies .iso files on this 1 GB hdd and only about 60GB of mostly high bit rate mp3 going to have to move the movies over to the LAN server pretty soon I could always shrink them but I like them bit for bit .only 411 Gb left of free space lots of pictures on here also over 200,000 of vintage ,classic and antique cars .(business and pleasure travel ) photos from all over family photos some videos Newer ones are Sony 1080p handy cam amazing little thing . takes pictures also not like a good DSLR or SLR but not bad for what it is better than a phone or tard pad .
I have another GB drive in here about half full of media files and music 3-4 TB drives are not expensive now .

How's it going ? You still think Lame is the best (free) MP3 encoder
and what do you think about EAC vs Audacity I have audacity + lame ..and foobar 2000 ofc which would you recommend?

I use EAC + Lame for most of my ripping. EAC is cool because it can support ripping from up to 4 drives at a time which in combination with an 8 core CPU makes quick work of my CD buying binges. IME Lame uses up to two cores at a time for each instance file compression.

Hence I advocate to have the audio in a lossless format to avoid generation loss in the future.

I accomplish that the old-fashioned way: I keep the original CDs in a cool dry dark place. I've got CDs from the early 1980s, even some of the first CDs sold in the US and they all play and rip perfectly.

I can assure you that video is completely, absolutely wrong. There is no way to see or calculate the differences a human perceives between a flac and an mp3. Hearing is a psychoacoustic process. [See https://www.google.com/search?q=psychoacoustic ]. It's not mathematical - you cannot take the difference between the two tracks, as this video does, and say that is the difference.

In particular, a well-done lossy encode evaluates which sounds are masked by other sounds. Everything that the video claims to present as the difference could in fact be inaudible in the original recording, because it is masked by a louder sound. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking ] So to say, "Hear this? That's what you've lost" is entirely inaccurate and misleading, and reveals nothing but a complete lack of understanding of lossy encoding and audio.

BTW, I may be in part personally responsible for this kind of misuse of this analysis. For years I had the leading reference site for how to identify live recordings that had been converted to MP3, then back to wav. The idea was, get people to circulate the original recordings, not bad copies. (Then people could transcode them into any format they want.) This kind of analysis (frequency and spectral analysis) is useful for that purpose. It is useless for any analysis of how lossy and lossless recordings compare when heard by a human ear.

But a lot of people who didn't know what they were doing have done an analysis like the one in this video. It's not new.

I accomplish that the old-fashioned way: I keep the original CDs in a cool dry dark place. I've got CDs from the early 1980s, even some of the first CDs sold in the US and they all play and rip perfectly.

I have not had the same luck. A number of my CDs from 1980s would not rip properly even though I take excellent care of them and none had any visual flaws.

As to you using Lame MP3 for your rips, well, that is lame Arny . You are losing fidelity. If you ever have to convert them down you will suffer double compression losses to boot.

I hope everyone uses the proper advice of ripping into lossless formats. Back them up with a hard disk and it will take a fraction of the space of those CDs.

I can assure you that video is completely, absolutely wrong. There is no way to see or calculate the differences a human perceives between a flac and an mp3. Hearing is a psychoacoustic process. [See https://www.google.com/search?q=psychoacoustic ]. It's not mathematical - you cannot take the difference between the two tracks, as this video does, and say that is the difference.

One word: Huzzah!

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy_

In particular, a well-done lossy encode evaluates which sounds are masked by other sounds. Everything that the video claims to present as the difference could in fact be inaudible in the original recording, because it is masked by a louder sound. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking ] So to say, "Hear this? That's what you've lost" is entirely inaccurate and misleading, and reveals nothing but a complete lack of understanding of lossy encoding and audio.

Huzzah again!

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy_

BTW, I may be in part personally responsible for this kind of misuse of this analysis. For years I had the leading reference site for how to identify live recordings that had been converted to MP3, then back to wav. The idea was, get people to circulate the original recordings, not bad copies. (Then people could transcode them into any format they want.) This kind of analysis (frequency and spectral analysis) is useful for that purpose. It is useless for any analysis of how lossy and lossless recordings compare when heard by a human ear.

Totally agreed. I've done exactly the same thing. I find it works, and others tell me it works for them. It is far from perfect and extrapolating too much from such a simplistic process is dangerous, but as far as it goes...

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy_

But a lot of people who didn't know what they were doing have done an analysis like the one in this video. It's not new.

I seem to recall an article in Stereophile that appears to me to have made the identical same mistake.

That is a problem that you just made up and is totally unrepresentative of what I would actually do.

Think for a moment - if you had a library of rippable CDs, and you wanted to have a library of them in some lossy format, what to do?

I rip into WMA lossless and use Windows Media Player to automatically create lossy WMA versions for other uses such as my car or phone. I just drag the files to the file and WMP does the rest.

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

Well, let us see here, I just built a high performance ripping facility. I have the original CDs What to do? What to do? Can you help me here? ;-)

I just did Arny .

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

BTW this is the second time that I've ripped some of these CDs. Have you figured out my plan of action for the eventuality that you mentioned yet? ;-)

Amir, you know what my day job is. Want to hazard a guess how many hard drives I've seen that failed spontaneously?

One solution that looks good to me would be to build a RAID 5 array and monitor it frequently so that you know when it fails and needs to be repaired and rebuilt.

RAID is not back up. RAID 5 is for performance and you don't need that for audio. Given the small amount of storage requirements (relatively speaking), mirroring is the right solution. Either in real-time or occasional back up.

Yes, hard drives fail that is why you want to have back ups. In my case, I have a portable drive that has all of my content on it that sits in a drawer. And I have another copy on my system at our vacation house. I have not had to resort to either as none of my media drives have ever crashed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

One other benefit of lossy compression for me is the fact that I do a lot of listening from somewhat limited flash-based portable digital players.

I am lucky enough to have unlimited data plan on my mobile phone so these days, I listen to my content from Amazon streamed to my phone and the car. I have a sampling of my favorite songs on the phone when I am on the plane with no data connection. I no longer use my flash-based music player. Sprint is advertising that subscription music services can be used without it counting toward your quota. So that may be another path to using streaming for non-critical listening.

For home listening I only use WMA Lossless files. There is just no reason to use lossy compression.

Quote:

Originally Posted by arnyk

The owner of CDs who rips them and uses the ripped copies has a moral and legal responsibility to maintain ownership of the CDs so that space cannot be legally recovered.

Not aware of any moral or legal rules stating this. If you give them to someone else, sure. But you have no responsibility to "maintain ownership." It is like I buy eggs and if they goes bad, I throw them in the trash. By your logic I would be forced to eat them . So no, you can do with them as you wish including dumping them in the trash.

Even if someone else finds them and uses them, that is fine in US. There is a "first sale doctrine" that says once you buy something, you can do with it as you wish and the rights of the content owner terminate at that point. This is how Netflix managed to rent DVDs to millions of people despite the wishes of movie studios. Outside of the US this doctrine does not hold but still, i am confident you can throw your content in the trash and there would be no issue at all.

I (we) Use .WAV for 24 bit working and archived studio projects ofc the commercial DAWS do not support FLAC
and 24 bit leaves headroom for editing/mixing and can always be copied to 16 bit or lossey as needed .
Some are copied to 16 bit ,AAC or mp3 for various reasons .

I'm just as likely to listen to one or another when not mobile ......TBH sometimes on some selections I prefer losslees
As to weather that is expectation bias or real differences (in most cases ) that I can really hear it's hard for me to say so not being an expert and not being sure *except in some cases * nothing to add other than it's surprising just how good a modem lossey encode *can sound from a good recording . ! ☺☺☺

Hires Music formats ..............."Why does it sound like a CD ?" ............. can we make it louder "?
"The wireless music box has no commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
- David Sarnoff's associates at RCA the 1920's -

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Quote:

Originally Posted by 89grand

Oh yeah, Bigdick, not Big Al. Yes he is a GM cheerleader...and I know precisely why.

Back to music files...

B J predictably closed the thread over there at *that other site * just as it was getting interesting but not out of hand at all in any way yet he fanboy trolls the very threads he moderates he's a piece of work !

That's OK I owned him big time (in a big way ) again when he was making a fan boy comment in another thread I didn't start ha ha. I know he ain't liking that I just very politely without insult present the facts . I think some other are getting a kick out of it

He is way to easy he doesn't know the subject well or anybody in the business and is only a lame pretender anyone in the business can see that ! if he ever was in the business it would have been at a low level maybe sales / service at a dealeship . or mfr assy line position ( I think that may be a stretch) Besides assy workers know lots more than he does (or most people ) some of those folks are very sharp and can tell good insider story's .

You get the big picture at corporate management level for a multi national OEM or Automaker in the business because if you don't you will be replaced rather quickly .

Back over to Netflix streaming quality thread .

If you read some of Arny's Posts ( *we should call him teach here * ) there is lots to learn... I used to do that and still do just to learn stuff !
some of it I can half way understand now sometimes , some of it I can understand (now) he can get technical way over my head sometimes but also informative ofc that is his business .

Hires Music formats ..............."Why does it sound like a CD ?" ............. can we make it louder "?
"The wireless music box has no commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
- David Sarnoff's associates at RCA the 1920's -

I have not had the same luck. A number of my CDs from 1980s would not rip properly even though I take excellent care of them and none had any visual flaws.

Try dBPowerAmp and a different DVD-ROM drive, and I bet you might have better luck. The AccurateRip engine within dBP is remarkably good, and I like it a lot better than EAC and the other free programs. The tagging sources with dBP put it head and shoulders above everything else I've used.

I have a fairly large collection -- well over 10,000 CDs, last time I counted -- and I've only managed to knock out about 5000 as Apple Lossless rips over the last 6-7 years. Once I have the Lossless files as archives, I make a couple of backups and then downres the ones I want on iPods at 320kbps AAC. I listen to the Lossless at home and the AAC's everywhere else, and it works fine for me. Just getting the rips and metadata right is the biggest part of the problem to solve.

However RAID 5 fault tolerant. Loss of 1 drive in the RAID 5 array is recoverable at some cost in processing.

Your portable disk drive can be sufficient. My music files are small enough to fit on a USB 3.0 flash drive, and that also suffices. IME flash drives that are kept secure and not abused are more reliable than hard drives.

"RAID 5 comprises block-level striping with distributed parity. Unlike in RAID 4, parity information is distributed among the drives. It requires that all drives but one be present to operate. Upon failure of a single drive, subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that no data is lost. RAID 5 requires at least three disks."

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

RAID 5 is for performance and you don't need that for audio. Given the small amount of storage requirements (relatively speaking), mirroring is the right solution. Either in real-time or occasional back up.

However mirroring is AKA RAID 1 and now you appear to be contradicting what you just said about RAID not being backup.

Surprising to see a self-professed Unix authority stumble over such simple stuff. ;-)

FWIW I make extensive use of RAID in the computers I sell to small enterprises, and the machine I'm typing on uses SSDs in a RAID array (an experiment).

I have not had the same luck. A number of my CDs from 1980s would not rip properly even though I take excellent care of them and none had any visual flaws.

As to you using Lame MP3 for your rips, well, that is lame Arny . You are losing fidelity. If you ever have to convert them down you will suffer double compression losses to boot.
<snip>

Why would he ever need to convert them down further? You've repeated ad nauseam that given todays cheap storage, nobody ever needs to have anything lower than flac or wav, and preferable yet, high-res files when they're available, in order to minimize even the smallest chance for comprised sound. Now, you're concerned that already compressed files may suffer if they ever need to be compressed further?!? Why would they ever need to be if they needn't ever be compressed in the first place?

The owner of CDs who rips them and uses the ripped copies has a moral and legal responsibility to maintain ownership of the CDs so that space cannot be legally recovered.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

Not aware of any moral or legal rules stating this. If you give them to someone else, sure. But you have no responsibility to "maintain ownership." It is like I buy eggs and if they goes bad, I throw them in the trash. By your logic I would be forced to eat them . So no, you can do with them as you wish including dumping them in the trash.

The big difference being that when you buy eggs you pretty much unconditionally own the eggs. Every egg you own is a unique entity. When you buy a recorded work the ownership is not unconditional, it is actually a different legal right called licensing. The copy of the recorded work is not unique, but simply a copy of the original copyrighted work.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

There is a "first sale doctrine" that says once you buy something, you can do with it as you wish and the rights of the content owner terminate at that point.

That is a horrific distortion of the "First Sale Doctrine". When I buy a licensed musical work the things that I can legally do with it are limited by the license. If I break the terms of my license, its owner can take me to court and sue me and win a large settlement, depending, so his rights are not completely terminated. For one thing I cannot copy it ad nausem. How I copy it or portions of it are legally limited by a doctrine that is sometimes called "Fair Use".

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

This is how Netflix managed to rent DVDs to millions of people despite the wishes of movie studios. Outside of the US this doctrine does not hold but still, i am confident you can throw your content in the trash and there would be no issue at all.

Here's the problem. I have a copy of copyrighted work on a piece of media in my posession or stored on The Cloud. I claim that I have the right to use that work in certain ways because once upon a time I bought a recording of it and didn't sell it. If the original media is not in my possession, how can I prove that I did indeed buy the recording and did not sell it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

I am lucky enough to have unlimited data plan on my mobile phone so these days, I listen to my content from Amazon streamed to my phone and the car. I have a sampling of my favorite songs on the phone when I am on the plane with no data connection. I no longer use my flash-based music player. Sprint is advertising that subscription music services can be used without it counting toward your quota. So that may be another path to using streaming for non-critical listening.

In contrast I am lucky enough to spend extended periods of time in places that lack electronic communications other than things like satellite phones. No digital data cell network. No cell network of any kind. No broadcast reception of with even vaguely good audio quality. If I search the FM band with a good receiver with a good antenna it scans endlessly.

I don't know anybody who is lucky enough to be able to afford to use a satellite phone for hours of music listening. Certainly that person is not me.

The only electrical power available to me in these remote locations is the solar panels and the batteries that I can personally carry. A smart phone will exhaust all reasonable sources of power in a few days.

I have to even be a little choosy about the portable dedicated digital music player that I use, and they use only a tiny fraction as much power as even a basic cell phone let alone a smart phone.

With high bitrate MP3s I easily obtain really pretty good sound for days and weeks of listening several hours every day. And I exploit it!

Try dBPowerAmp and a different DVD-ROM drive, and I bet you might have better luck. The AccurateRip engine within dBP is remarkably good, and I like it a lot better than EAC and the other free programs. The tagging sources with dBP put it head and shoulders above everything else I've used.

Thanks. I know about dbpoweramp. The CDs other than one or two were not that good of a music so it has not been a priority to go back and redo them. I did try different drives with the same outcome.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Marc

I have a fairly large collection -- well over 10,000 CDs, last time I counted -- and I've only managed to knock out about 5000 as Apple Lossless rips over the last 6-7 years. Once I have the Lossless files as archives, I make a couple of backups and then downres the ones I want on iPods at 320kbps AAC. I listen to the Lossless at home and the AAC's everywhere else, and it works fine for me. Just getting the rips and metadata right is the biggest part of the problem to solve.

You are doing the right thing . I just don't understand people who keep using MP3.

The big difference being that when you buy eggs you pretty much unconditionally own the eggs. Every egg you own is a unique entity. When you buy a recorded work the ownership is not unconditional, it is actually a different legal right called licensing.

Sorry no. It is not. I have signed no license whatsoever for the CDs I buy. There are no terms stated for it.

"The first-sale doctrine creates a basic exception to the copyright holder's distribution right. Once the work is lawfully sold or even transferred gratuitously, the copyright owner's interest in the material object in which the copyrighted work is embodied is exhausted. The owner of the material object can then dispose of it as he sees fit. Thus, one who buys a copy of a book is entitled to resell it, rent it, give it away, or destroy it. [...] The rationale of the doctrine is to prevent the copyright owner from restraining the free alienability of goods. Without the doctrine, a possessor of a copy of a copyrighted work would have to negotiate with the copyright owner every time he wished to dispose of his copy. After the initial transfer of ownership of a legal copy of a copyrighted work, the first-sale doctrine exhausts copyright holder's right to control how ownership of that copy can be disposed of. For this reason, this doctrine is also referred to as "exhaustion rule."

If you buy music online (or videos), then you are subject to a license. But not the physical discs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

That is a horrific distortion of the "First Sale Doctrine". When I buy a licensed musical work the things that I can legally do with it are limited by the license. If I break the terms of my license, its owner can take me to court and sue me and win a large settlement, depending, so his rights are not completely terminated. For one thing I cannot copy it ad nausem. How I copy it or portions of it are legally limited by a doctrine that is sometimes called "Fair Use".

In that regard, you are a distributor of content with an agreed upon license. That has nothing to do with me buying a CD. I have not agreed to any license nor am I copying it when I throw it in trash. Please read the Wiki as it clearly explains the difference between buying something and being a distributor.

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

Here's the problem. I have a copy of copyrighted work on a piece of media in my posession or stored on The Cloud. I claim that I have the right to use that work in certain ways because once upon a time I bought a recording of it and didn't sell it. If the original media is not in my possession, how can I prove that I did indeed buy the recording and did not sell it?

If you don't share that link with others to get copies, no one will go after you. They wouldn't even know you have done that. So you don't need that "proof." You are allowed to make backup copies of your content and use that should the original disappear.

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

In contrast I am lucky enough to spend extended periods of time in places that lack electronic communications other than things like satellite phones. No digital data cell network. No cell network of any kind. No broadcast reception of with even vaguely good audio quality. If I search the FM band with a good receiver with a good antenna it scans endlessly.

That's fine. I am in the same boat so to speak, when I am in an airplane. Hence the reason I said I keep a sampling of files locally on my phone.

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

The only electrical power available to me in these remote locations is the solar panels and the batteries that I can personally carry. A smart phone will exhaust all reasonable sources of power in a few days.

A phone used as a music player with its radios turned off will be pretty efficient power wise. My new Samsung tablet has a prediction mode in low power mode which I just tested and it says I have power for 82 days!

Quote:

Originally Posted by arny

I have to even be a little choosy about the portable dedicated digital music player that I use, and they use only a tiny fraction as much power as even a basic cell phone let alone a smart phone.

Why would he ever need to convert them down further? You've repeated ad nauseam that given todays cheap storage, nobody ever needs to have anything lower than flac or wav, and preferable yet, high-res files when they're available, in order to minimize even the smallest chance for comprised sound. Now, you're concerned that already compressed files may suffer if they ever need to be compressed further?!? Why would they ever need to be if they needn't ever be compressed in the first place?

You are mixing my scenario with theirs. There are two possibilities for ripping into MP3:

1. Low bit rate like 128 kbps was used. In this case, you have for sure given up quality so the discussion is done.

2. You used something like Lame VBR mode at highest quality level. While in my book you have still lost fidelity, let's say you have not. In this mode you have told the encoder to keep the quality constant (per its perceptual model) and let the bit rate vary. Peak rate in this situation can be quite high. In theory it can go as high as 1.4 mbit/sec of the original track but usually there is enough redundancy that the back-end of the codec can reduce this down to say 600 to 700 kbit/sec.

Now, there is no certification or any such authority for implementation of MP3. Folks get the spec or open source code and optimize it for the processor in question (either in a music player, phone or tablet). The testing they have done has likely been all using CBR mode which means the bit rate is strictly capped and quality is allowed to fluctuate.

Turns out the higher the bitrate, the higher the computational power you need to decode it. As such a constant bit rate 320 kbps MP3 will be easier to decode than some VBR encoded files that peak above this to above mentioned 600 to 700 kbps. If the code is not optimized enough, you will get a glitch in playback as the CPU/DSP falls behind.

I encode in VBR mode for my phone and I have a handful of tracks where the above happens. The phone pops and clicks and jumps ahead of the high peak segment. The solution to this is to re-encode at fixed bit rate as that provides reliable playback. So that is your answer.

Net, net, if you are encoding in VBR mode, you have neither fish nor fowl. You are not getting transparency while having files that are still rather big and have peaks that may cause glitches.

Remember, lossless encoding gives you around 2:1 to 2.5:1 compression on the average. This means the effective data rate is from 560 kbps to 700 kbps. I think my library averages close to the 700 kbps mark. This is only 2x more storage than max rate MP3. So the penalty is not that high to get transparency.

amirm, you don't understand audio encoding, and your conclusions are the wrong ones.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

2. You used something like Lame VBR mode at highest quality level. While in my book you have still lost fidelity, let's say you have not. In this mode you have told the encoder to keep the quality constant (per its perceptual model) and let the bit rate vary. Peak rate in this situation can be quite high. In theory it can go as high as 1.4 mbit/sec of the original track but usually there is enough redundancy that the back-end of the codec can reduce this down to say 600 to 700 kbit/sec.

No, it's not possible for the data to peak at 1.4 mbit/sec as stored in the file, as basic lossless compression techniques can squeeze that down substantially. Decoding that is trivial, so whatever point you're making is off the mark.

Also, you have mis-read the compression ratios for lossless audio, you seem to have them backwards. There is no practical codec that consistently reduces the files to 600-700 kbps across a broad range of music types (such as rock or popular music). See the graphs at https://xiph.org/flac/comparison.html Using a variety of music, the best average results achieved were 53% (or 747 kbps, for comparison), and practical codecs that operate at speeds people will tolerate are higher than that. The kind of music most people listen to won't go under 50%. Some classical pieces will, but that's not a typical result.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

The testing they have done has likely been all using CBR mode which means the bit rate is strictly capped and quality is allowed to fluctuate.

People at HydrogenAudio etc. have been using VBR for 10-15 years. No serious encoder uses CBR, as it's a waste of bits, though they do preserve that option as a legacy feature.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

Turns out the higher the bitrate, the higher the computational power you need to decode it. As such a constant bit rate 320 kbps MP3 will be easier to decode than some VBR encoded files that peak above this to above mentioned 600 to 700 kbps. If the code is not optimized enough, you will get a glitch in playback as the CPU/DSP falls behind.

Kind of true - if this were 2002. Even inexpensive handheld devices have been able to manage VBR for many years now. My standard car radio plays VBR MP3s off a USB without trouble.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

I encode in VBR mode for my phone and I have a handful of tracks where the above happens. The phone pops and clicks and jumps ahead of the high peak segment. The solution to this is to re-encode at fixed bit rate as that provides reliable playback. So that is your answer.

No, the answer is to use an adequate device for music playback. It's a lot of work to do encodes of a big library of music - do it right the first time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

Net, net, if you are encoding in VBR mode, you have neither fish nor fowl. You are not getting transparency while having files that are still rather big and have peaks that may cause glitches.

No, people should encode everything in VBR. CBR, in general, is a waste of space except in specialized applications.

320kbps is a waste of space, you might as well just go lossless at that point. That is, if you're going to use compression, use the technology - compress. Keep a lossless copy, too, if that's worth it to you.

Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

transparency.

Where's the rolleyes emoticon? You can find these same discussions going back ten years or more. There's nothing new to be said.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

Thanks. I know about dbpoweramp. The CDs other than one or two were not that good of a music so it has not been a priority to go back and redo them. I did try different drives with the same outcome.

You are doing the right thing . I just don't understand people who keep using MP3.

re tubetwister

Nothing wrong with high bit rate mp3 . I prefer AAC though for several reasons ,nothing wrong with loss less either everybody has different priorities in life

I archive in loss less and copy to AAC or mp*** mostly .AAC though I prefer that over mp** depending on intended use . I listen to both 16/44.1 or AAC mostly . I've taken many of my original FLAC and WAV I had copied to mp***
and copied them to AAC and deleted the mp**** (good housekeeping IMO ) what convinced me is VBR Video .
Specifically the newest Netflix Super HD VBR codecs VS Amazon instant CBR Although all my DVD rips are .ISO.
but that's a different thing altogether .

I prefer to to always archive in loss less to preserve the original and there are many times I *believe music may sound better played back loss less depending on the playback chain .key word being believe. could be bias expectation sometimes but not in every case . I don't do portables and ear buds or portables and phones (might be fine for a lot folks they sell plenty ) but I have some decent cans otherwise.

And if music is your career that's fine someone has to make it,the media and the playback devices but work is
work just that ...after a while the longer you do it and older you get it should come into in perspective .

Nothing wrong with camping or getting away from things with or without a digital player
did that without one for years either way getting away now and then is always good IMO

Not much for hires I did the
SACD thing and all and all things being equal (mastering /recording/yadda yadda ) IMO 16/44.1 Red book CD
sounds just as good as SACD on real decent system so on anything less than that (or higher resolutions )ofc results would be obvious. Still have my Sony ES spinner played them both ways digital and analog out from the spinner
mostly burr brown dacs in the playback chain also .Now TI owns them you can buy the chips for maybe 10_$15.00 now
and roll your own Dac if you are so inclined doesn't cost a fortune to cobble a good Dac together on a breadboard .

The old straw man argument "your system or your DAC isn't revealing enough " doesn't hold any water with me
even with *some 16/44.1 and modern high bit rate mp** and AAC comparisons my studio equipment can be quite analytical or rock the s**t outta you and anyone in the neighborhood ether way it's sufficient to squash that straw man argument especially when you consider a lot of commercial CD's are often compressed down to less than 6-7 dB sometimes less . If they would master commercial Redbook CD at anywhere near Redbook potential regularly the hires argument would completely disappear IMO .

One of the tricks they use with the samplers is the use of vocals and or acoustical music mostly something not very complex so you can focus on the detail that well done 16/44.1 can also provide but if you aren't aware of that
they are hoping you will drop something in your shopping cart .

In some cases hires tracks may originate from
sources using better recording/mastering techniques maybe with less compression that would otherwise sound just as good at 16/44.1 IMO those are the legitimate exceptions if they can't be had in red book IMO
( and they are out there plenty sometimes ) have to do your research on those !

I've done a few non scientific comparisons in the studio
with the same results IMO for the most part .

lots of folks that advocate hires in forums now and then are trying to push expensive Dacs and hires media, equipment , files or cables or just their point of view and otherwise like to defend their choices sometimes a lot of it is nonsense .

You don't have to spend a fortune for good sound these days .
Well decent speakers still aren't cheap but you can do alright there if you don't listen to the marketing dis information
or the brand snobs .

OTOH any of the JBL Everest speakers ,Synthisis products and lots of the current, legacy and vintage products and some of the current monitors would alwayse be welcome here they didn't get where they are for nothing !.

Thing is the audiophool marketers have to stay in business like they always have just like the exotic cable people
(whom are part of that group ) and continue to proliferate disinformation like always just like Sony did with SACD some things never change .

Hires Music formats ..............."Why does it sound like a CD ?" ............. can we make it louder "?
"The wireless music box has no commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
- David Sarnoff's associates at RCA the 1920's -

amirm, you don't understand audio encoding, and your conclusions are the wrong ones.

It could be.

Keep in mind though that for more than a decade I managed development of audio (and video) compression at Microsoft. My group developed such things as WMA and WMA Lossless. I also hold some (joint) patents in audio compression/signal processing. Your qualifications are?

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy

No, it's not possible for the data to peak at 1.4 mbit/sec as stored in the file, as basic lossless compression techniques can squeeze that down substantially.

That is incorrect. You are confusing average with instantaneous peaks.

When the level of redundancy in an audio segment shrinks to zero, the process of lossless compression can actually result in the expansion of data! The encoder is smart though and when this happens, it simply takes the original data and passes it along as "compressed data." Since no compression is occurring in that case, the data rate matches the original source which is 1.4 mbit/sec.

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy

Also, you have mis-read the compression ratios for lossless audio, you seem to have them backwards. There is no practical codec that consistently reduces the files to 600-700 kbps across a broad range of music types (such as rock or popular music).

I didn't say anything was "consistent." I was giving an example.

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy

See the graphs at https://xiph.org/flac/comparison.html Using a variety of music, the best average results achieved were 53% (or 747 kbps, for comparison), and practical codecs that operate at speeds people will tolerate are higher than that. The kind of music most people listen to won't go under 50%. Some classical pieces will, but that's not a typical result.

I don't know what "most people listen to" or the point of complaining about 600 kbps vs 700 or 740.

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy

People at HydrogenAudio etc. have been using VBR for 10-15 years. No serious encoder uses CBR, as it's a waste of bits, though they do preserve that option as a legacy feature.

I took on the compression group at Microsoft around 1998. So please don't tell me what some online people have been doing for "10 to 15" years . And I have years of experience in signal processing prior to that. I didn't just hang around forums and didn't get my knowledge that way. I managed a large team of signal processing experts and spent quite a bit of time working at the lowest levels with the team to develop this technology.

Anyway, what you state is wrong. Encoders support both CBR and VBR. The most common mode used is CBR which is the mode used for streaming and for digital distribution.

BTW, there is no guarantee that VBR produces the best quality. It will give you the smallest file for the given quality, but not always the best.

As I explained, when you choose VBR mode, you are telling the codec to decide how much bandwidth it needs to allocate as it encodes the file. Now, the encoder's job is still to save bits/bandwidth/file size. In that sense it attempts to balance fidelity with file size (the options you use on the encoder change the priority of this).

If on the the other hand you pick very high bit rate CBR such as 320 kbps, the codec may for some segments have more bandwidth available to it than VBR. The VBR file will have a smaller file size but will have also compromised fidelity some.

I have tested the above extensively when my team was developing WMA. I would say in about 10 to 20% of time CBR produced better fidelity. We could have "fixed" that but that would have pushed the file sizes up for everything else.

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzzy

Kind of true - if this were 2002. Even inexpensive handheld devices have been able to manage VBR for many years now. My standard car radio plays VBR MP3s off a USB without trouble.

Actually they have managed VBR for longer than that. The issue is whether it is reliable for all content. Chances are in this day and age that it is but as I explained, my quad core HTC smartphone will glitch occasionally.

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzz

No, people should encode everything in VBR. CBR, in general, is a waste of space except in specialized applications.

Didn't say anyone should use CBR. The recommendation is to use lossless for ripping.

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzz

320kbps is a waste of space, you might as well just go lossless at that point. That is, if you're going to use compression, use the technology - compress. Keep a lossless copy, too, if that's worth it to you.

Which is what I have been recommending but I was asked to talk about scenarios that involve lossy to lossy conversion and I gave some examples.

Quote:

Originally Posted by buzz

Where's the rolleyes emoticon? You can find these same discussions going back ten years or more. There's nothing new to be said.

The discussions of old are all obsolete and moot. No one who is here who cares about audio fidelity should bother with lossy compression -- VBR or not -- for their music library. Only the people married to HA forum and such run around advertising Lame VBR encoding. As you say, time has come and gone on those arguments. Storage is dirt cheap and you should go lossless. And use streaming for on-the-run casual listening. That is what I do.

Not much for hires I did the
SACD thing and all and all things being equal (mastering /recording/yadda yaadda ) IMO 16/44.1 Red book CD
sounded just as good as SACD on real decent system so on anything less than that ofc results would be obvious.

I've done a few non scientific comparisons in the studio
with the same results for the most part .

lots of folks that advocate hires in forums now and then are trying to push expensive Dacs and hires media or files or cables and all that kind of stuff a lot of it is nonsense you don't have to spend a fortune for good sound these days .

Well, my experience is different. You can read about it in this post I wrote today: Debate Thread: Scott's Hi-res Audio Test. As you see you there, I had no trouble passing double blind tests, one of which was created by Arny himself, when testing 24/96 against 16/44.1.

But sure, I am not here at all to advocate certain quality for everyone. But rather, making sure the right data gets out there so that if someone wants to strive for the best, they get the right information as opposed to folklore on forums.

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Originally Posted by amirm View Post
Turns out the higher the bitrate, the higher the computational power you need to decode it. As such a constant bit rate 320 kbps MP3 will be easier to decode than some VBR encoded files that peak above this to above mentioned 600 to 700 kbps. If the code is not optimized enough, you will get a glitch in playback as the CPU/DSP falls behind.

re tubetwister

S**t if any of my CPU did .....glitched while encoding something as trivial as audio and it wasn't s**ty software or VST causing it
I would kick it to the curb !

I re encode DVD's and B/D in the background while multi tasking in windows and playing an HD video +,surfing the web
all at the same time with no glitches or hiccups and this is my 3 yr old 4 core daily driver. I have stronger one in the Studio so I hate be the one
to tell you but unless you are using an old P4 or something and some s**ty software that's a bit of a straw mans argument these days no ?

Hires Music formats ..............."Why does it sound like a CD ?" ............. can we make it louder "?
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- David Sarnoff's associates at RCA the 1920's -

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Quote:

Originally Posted by amirm

Well, my experience is different. You can read about it in this post I wrote today: Debate Thread: Scott's Hi-res Audio Test. As you see you there, I had no trouble passing double blind tests, one of which was created by Arny himself, when testing 24/96 against 16/44.1.

But sure, I am not here at all to advocate certain quality for everyone. But rather, making sure the right data gets out there so that if someone wants to strive for the best, they get the right information as opposed to folklore on forums.

With all due respect the thing is when you present arguments like the ones above regarding computational power of modern CPU glitching doing somethings as trivial as audio re encoding these days it makes think your CPU or knowledge or experience is dated . ofc there is phone thing that may be the deal .

My Samsung Galaxy wouldn't have any trouble with VBR it does HD video and VBR audio just fine even You tube uses that now and you can upload from most any smart phone so they will be encoding vbr audio along with mpeg 4 video at the same time to upload no big deal these days

I prefer not to listen to music or watch anything a phone or a PDP of any kind though but
if anybody else want's to with mp**,AAC or FLAC or whatever it's fine with me .

As far as the hires thing goes even the
AES and Boston audio society and many other credible sources take positions similar to my opinions

The easily discernible marketing tricks used aren't to hard to verify at all they are very basic and rather unsophisticated but then so is Herbalife marketing and they are making a killing !
I have *some professional expertise in that field having participated in many adverting meetings,strategy sessions and media buys it's very data driven now.

I should have bought Hebalife long a good while back when it was cheap !
Bill Ackman is loosing his shirt thinking he could short it, Carl Icahn is laughing all the way to the bank I believe Ackman's position has merit he just picked picked the wrong battle with wrong people that being Icahn and his boyz .

I've seen some things about hires that are nothing more than marketing nonsense with no science behind it
over the years in advertising and on public forums . Every position has their ardent following and vested interests whether the position has merit or not .

ofc anyone in the AV business would have to support the hires position
as a matter course that's entirely understandable as a business case and there is nothing wrong with that and a valid position to market as many customers expect it these days and will often seek it out that's just business
and very legitimate and expected as well as required to serve the customers who desire it very understandable from a business position .

Based on my experience with SACD and recent hires comparisons here I've pretty much lost interest in hires music other than maybe obtaining a good recording that may not be available in another format that happens now and then.

With all due respect your results contradict those of of AES and some other prominent sources . I cant prove or disprove your hearing perception methodology or bias expectations or results. .Besides I am not an expert in these fields but try to form informed opinions many based on experience and research and I state them as opinions.

I wish someone would Bring us multiple scientific blind peer reviewed ABX tests with lots of samples (hundreds of trained and untrained listeners ) that support the hires position they should be out there by now as long as hi res has been around and it shouldent be open to debate at all it should be an open and shut case like mono vs stereo or color TV vs black and white TV or 1080p vs 480i .
.

I should be able to easily download some same source hires and redbook files and readily be able to tell the difference in Foobar 2000 ABX comparitor ( I 've done that ) I couldn't reliably tell the difference on cans or studio decent monitors not to mention comparing SACD and CD over a few years .

No problem telling the difference between 480i and 1080p on the telly nobody's much debating that these days
Now it's Ultra HD vs HD being pushed by the TV manufacturers and not necessarily for altruistic or valid reasons
much beyond product differentiation and increasing unit sales in a saturated marketplace that's how business works sometimes . 4K is cool from 2- 3 ft away though .

One could also say anyone serious about high fidelity wouldn't put music on a phone anyway to begin with so you can't always have it both ways . I'll go look at your post maybe I will learn something maybe not , no offense I gave up on that thread due to lack of interest from my own experiences and the same straw man arguments that have been going on for years .

One position I've mentioned and maybe did not in this thread was "try the different formats and see what you like .
even if something only makes you think it sounds better go for it of it makes you feel better audiophools been doing that for years I fell for some of that nonsense some years back nothing major but still disinformation ". ☺☺

There are very legitimate reasons to obtain hires media I mentioned above but that has nothing to do with the real wold metrics of the argument IMO.

Hires Music formats ..............."Why does it sound like a CD ?" ............. can we make it louder "?
"The wireless music box has no commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?"
- David Sarnoff's associates at RCA the 1920's -